And it's still not done yet: while the original series was no slouch in that department either, Rebuild 3.0's use of Ode to Joy is FUCKINGEPIC.

Haruhi Suzumiya had its space battle episode (the Shout-Out to Uchuu Senkan Yamato) employ this trope with Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. Fittingly, the "training" course that they went through was set to the almost-comical, waddling march at the end of the first movement.

In turn, the Jupiter part was used in Hunter × Hunter when Bonolenov uses his "Jupiter" attack—as Bonolenov is a Dance Battler, there is perhaps no better song to use.

Invoked in Kill la Kill, wherein Nonon decides that the upcoming battle between Ryuko and Tsumugu is a perfect opportunity for band practice. Later, in her one-on-one fight with Ryuko, she takes this trope as literally as it possibly can be, right down to nuking the battlefield with weaponized music.

In One Piece, when Luffy finally gets to multi-punch the everliving crap out of Crocodile, part of Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony (specifically, the first part of the fourth movement, "Allegro con fuoco") plays. It fits the scene surprisingly well.

Used pretty-much constantly in Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. With tons of Ominous Latin Chanting. More than justified, since it has pretty much an hour of nuclear explosion footage. I definitely heard Dies Ira, and I think I heard Die Valkyrie.

Aliens uses this a lot, particularly in the ambush of the Marines as they enter the hive and Ripley's escape with Newt from the exploding atmosphere processor.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture gives us the Klingon theme in its opening scene ("Klingon Battle") contributed by Jerry Goldsmith. V'Ger's theme, played on an instrument called the Blaster Beam, also features in the same scene.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, for all its faults, has the return of Jerry Goldsmith and his Klingon theme, with the screech of a real Bird-of-Prey mixed in, mainly heard in the track "With Out Help".

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country brings Cliff Eidelman, who contributes yet another Klingon theme, which provides the score for "The Battle For Peace", where the crew of the Enterprise frantically try to stop a conspiracy from destroying the last hope for universal peace.

Star Trek: First Contact has "Red Alert", where the Federation fleet takes on a Borg Cube headed straight for Earth. Jerry Goldsmith reprises his Klingon theme as Worf's Leitmotif.

Generations calls extra attention to the score as the scenes repeatedly shift between barely audible soft music as Picard tries to sneak into Soran's work area on the surface, and the blaring battle music as the Enterprise battles the Klingons in space, and the resulting crash landing due to damage.

In Honor of the Queen, Honor has Hammerwell's 7th symphony played shipwide during the first battle of Yeltsin.

One of the Havenite commanders uses "Ride of the Valkyries" as their general quarters signal.

In Small Favor, Hendricks and Gard (who happens to be an honest-to-god Valkyrie) perform a Big Damn Heroes with an attack helicopter to "The Ride of The Valkyries", with Hendricks riding shotgun... with a MiniGun.

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Live-Action TV

Farscape: The destruction of Scorpius' command carrier featured orchestral music and Ominous Latin Chanting.

Whenever there was any kind of fight sequence, whether it was between people or spaceships, it would be accompanied by the most over-the-top, bombastic music imaginable. In fact, they often did this even when there was no fighting happening, like say when an ambassador boards the ship. This was a critical element of the series' Narm Charm and really complemented the acting style. It was sadly missing from most of the later series - compare the scoring to the very same fight scene in "The Trouble With Tribbles" and DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" for a perfect example of this.

No Original Series score exemplifies this trope quite like the scores for "Amok Time" (by Gerald Fried) and "The Doomsday Machine" (by Sol Kaplan). Cues from both scores would go on to be reused throughout later episodes, with the cue "Ancient Battle" from the former being commonly known as the Star Trek Fight Music. The music from both episodes were even included together on one soundtrack album.

Ron Jones was probably the best among the composers for the sequel series at using this in his scores (see "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2" in particular the track "Intervention", for a perfect example). Too bad he left TNG during the fourth season. The main reason was because Rick Berman hated this trope, and wanted the music to be strictly part of the background of the show, like wallpaper.

Mythbusters recently had some fun with this trope in their Top 25 Special showing off their various explosions to the 1812 Overture.

Gustav Holst wrote the "Mars, Bringer of War" segment of The Planets suite before World War I had started, but it depicts the brutality and scale of its mechanized warfare brilliantly. John Williams certainly had it in mind - see the ship chase at the opening of Star WarsEpisode IV.

Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam Dresden, 1945) is a piece written to represent the firebombing of the German city of Dresden by the Allies in 1945. The first three movements are fairly slow and ominous, but the fourth, aptly entitled "Firestorm", pulls out all the stops. Trombones are made to imitate the sound of bomber engines, an air-raid sired blares, drums placed all around the stage are slammed to mimic the impact of the bombs, band members scream in German - it gets intense.

Ludwig van Beethoven was probably the first one to use the trope. His Eroica symphony opens with two full orchestral chords, to underline this point (Timpani included). His overture "Wellington's Victory" plays it even more literally, with the score calling for muskets and artillery sound effects to represent the battle.

Company of Heroes does this on a regular basis, one minute the music can barely be heard as your troops move around the village or pass a few bushes and blaring you with Trumpets and a wide assortment of instruments the next as your tanks get blown to pieces by rockets or shells raining down from heaven as if the sky was crashing down.. In short as the action heats up the orchestra start doing their thing, and it is Awesome.

No matter how bad the Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight was, and how the soundtrack is completely different from previous installments, anyone had to admit this: When you playing as GDI, and some action starts, THIS is freaking epic. Too bad its just about only epic thing from game officially entitled "epic conclusion of the saga".

Halo. The original trilogy has some particularly notable examples, such as "Brothers In Arms/Follow Our Brothers", "On/Behold A Pale Horse", "Drumrun" (during the escape from Halo: Combat Evolved's "The Maw"), "Earth City" (its rollicking and irregular rhythm fits with the movements of the Scarab Walker in Halo 2), "Delta Halo Suite: Leonidas" (heard in Halo 2 during the gondola rides on "Regret", and again in Halo 3 during the air battle on "The Covenant"), "Blow Me Away"(during the climactic battle on 2's "Gravemind" mission), "This Is Our Land", "This is the Hour" and "Finish The Fight" (the music in the original Halo 3 advertisement).

The Halo Theme, naturally. It becomes even more bombastic in Halo 3 as "Greatest Journey" (the final escape theme), when Martin O'Donnell swapped out the first game's synthesizers with a live orchestra.

If you can play through that part of the game without crying you aren't human.

Then it comes back during the truly epic battle of the final mission. Rebel reinforcements arrive to take the pressure off your fleet and start driving a hole through the Emperor's defenses, sacrificing themselves while giving you the chance to strike back For Great Justice. Hell yes.

In the final mission of Mass Effect 2, the score goes all out. First, there's the epic uplifting music during the space battle, then the score goes all out for the finale to bring the already awesome mission to a breathtaking close.

In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the final boss fight takes place in a field of white flowers and has a 10 minute time limit. If you have not defeated your opponent by that point, you both get killed in an air strike. The fight starts with no music at all, but after 5 minutes an instrumental version of the games main theme, which you have heard several times at that point, starts playing and you know that if you haven't won by the final note, you'll be dead.

Given the huge number of remixes and styles incorporated in the Super Smash Bros. series, pure statistics alone dictate that a ludicrously epic orchestral piece will be playing in the background at some point.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has this trope in spades, fittingly enough coming from the same music team behind the Galaxy games. While the overworld themes are surprisingly low-key (with the exception of the Sky theme), the boss themes in particular are particularly bombastic. The overall theme, Ballad of the Goddess, starts with a solo Harp of Femininity (appropriately enough), and after about 45 seconds launches into epicness.

BioShock. When you place the third (out of four) picture in the art collab, the already unstable Sander Cohen freaks out and, in a fit of instability, orders his henchmen to kill you. Cue the Moment of Awesome as you beat the living crap out of splicers who seem to come out of Hammer Space. You'll be symphonizing a bloody massacre while Waltz of the Flowers blares throughout the studio for minutes, though odds are that you'll be done by 2:44.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter has you traversing the game to various music score ranging from atmospheric ethnics to rock remixes of Jingle Bells. However, the final level is a massive showdown set to this.

A game that's unfortunately been largely forgotten, Kessen and its sequel Kessen II, runs on this trope. Kessenin particular was one of the first games ever to have a full orchestral soundtrack, performed by the Moscow International Symphonic Orchestra, so it was almost nothing butOrchestral Bombing. Kessen III, the last of the series, also has some bombing but uses Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly for most battle themes.

Mount & Blade: In the Napoleonic Wars mod, you get artillery to fire at the enemy. You also get troops that carry nothing but musical instruments to play for morale. The rest of the equation is up to you.

Much of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's soundtrack is quiet and understated to fit the theme of you wandering a huge, mostly empty world all on your own. Whenever you're in combat (particularly with a boss monster), trying to shut down a Divine Beast, or especially storming Hyrule Castle, things get much more rousing.

Pikmin 3 uses orchestral music for particularly large-scale boss battles, a pretty sharp contrast from the lower-key, atmospheric themes heard in the rest of the game (and series).

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The intro theme music for Batman: The Animated Series does this perfectly, with the booms and flourishes matching up perfectly with the action on-screen.

The old Disney cartoonMusic Land has this in a literal sense, when two music-themed islands of animate musical instruments assault each other... using giant organ pipes and horns as cannons.

In the canyon chase sequence of Rango, Ride of the Valkyries is played. On banjos. Note that the banjos are in-universe: they're being played by an army of hillbilly shrews as they chase the heroes on the backs of bats.

Real Life

During the first BLACK BUCK mission during the Falklands War, one of the crew of the Vulcan wondered where the orchestra was. They did play the theme from Chariots of Fire on the way home.

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